Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight: Grace H. Zhou
This monthly series features poems by women of color in the early stages of their publishing careers. It is our intention to create more space at Perugia for the work of poets who are Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC). We hope using our platform to highlight this work will expand the readership of the poets we spotlight. This series aligns with Perugia’s mission to celebrate and support emerging women poets, inclusive of gender-expansive identities; featured poems will be from poets with no more than one published full-length collection. We’d love to hear from readers with suggestions for poems & poets to feature.
September 2024 Poet: Grace H. Zhou
O Taraxacum
We dig and spray your dogged crawl of taproots and rhizomes. Pull up anchors once cast at full mast. Uproot old dreams of gold, god and utopia. Bayonet roots. Sail-to-a-new-world roots. False-destiny, deny-the-invasion roots. We weed and weed and weed. But the earth takes and the earth gives back, from this blood- drunk loam she makes her own balm, takes your sharp-toothed leaf for bitter comfort, makes milk root into black brew. See, we are the weeds. In waste places, on broken soil, let us learn how to tread softly, how to bloom in the millions, how to take root anew.
Source
Soil Called a Country, Newfound, 2023
Poet Bio
Grace H. Zhou (she/they) is the author of the chapbook, Soil Called a Country, which was selected for Newfound’s 2023 Emerging Poets Series. Her poems also appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, Narrative Magazine, Frontier Poetry, Longleaf Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. She received a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and is currently a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow. She serves as a poetry editor for Otherwise Magazine.